Before trying to give away the store, you should probably try to be sure
that someone will want to take it.

After all the hubbub about the geographical distribution of this year's
regionals and the expectation that there would be a better chance for a
cold-weather team to make it to Omaha, there was one minor detail that
didn't come through -- no one from the Northeast put in a bid to host a
regional. As a result, the hosting site list for this year looks much like
it has every year since the 1999 expansion. There are some oddities due
to the new rule about allowing conference opponents to play sooner in the
tournament, but that's not a particularly bad rule as long as it's not
abused, so overall things aren't that bad. Combined with the wonderful
time I had last week at the SEC tournament (Wednesday and Thursday are my
favorites -- eight games in two days, twelve hours a day, with everything
from the big [a masterful 97-pitch complete game by Lane Mestepey] to the
small [a fantastic slide-field-and-popup play by Chris Young to rob a
bunt single] to please the palate; I usually lose interest by Saturday when
it matters less in the big picture), I'm in a great mood this week of this
year for a change.

I'm going to begin by doing something out of character -- I'm going to
praise the committee. This is not a perfect field, but it is, by far, the
strongest field of 64 teams that they've put out there yet. If you look
back at my comments on last year's field,
you'll see that there were six categories of mistakes that the committee
tended to make. Out of those six, at least three aren't really present
in this year's selections -- the cold-weather bids are gone (whether through
an intentional shift or anger over the lack of bids, I'm not sure),
conference placement was ignored in a few places, and winning percentage
is no longer as big a factor, as they omitted three 40-win teams, the first
time they've left any of those out. I also don't really see any signs of
reputation bids in the selections, although there may be some involved in
the seeding. They still paid too much attention to the conference tourneys,
but that's a smaller category. Almost all of this year's errors can be
attributed to the RPI's.

That said, this is nowhere near a perfect bracket. A lot of that is not
the committee's fault for the most part -- they were stuck with the
geography rules and a really bad ranking system in the RPI. The only thing
that's really ludicrous that can be laid squarely at their feet is the
Fullerton, Stetson, and George Washington seedings; in all three cases they
distorted the seedings within a regional rather than just move a team to a
different, easily available regional. Stanford really should dedicate a
grad student to identifying future ways the committee will find to mistreat
them.

The Probabilities

The probabilities I give here are based on a system I've devised which uses
historical results between teams at each of the possible gaps in the ISR's.
For example, over the four years that I've done them, teams who were three
ISR points ahead of their opponents have won 59.9% of those games. I take
those numbers for each game, compute all of the possible outcomes, and add
up the probabilities. These are not exact, and they ignore a couple of
relevant factors like home field advantage (small but real for most teams)
and pitching matchups, but they're a reasonable raw tool for beginning
analysis if you don't take them too seriously. I don't want to go into
too much detail here, since I've already got folks nodding off, but feel
free to email me if you're interested in more detail.

They're rounded to the nearest percentage point, so anybody under half a
percent goes to zero. This is sports, of course, so everyone has at
least some chance of winning; feel free to read it as .49% if it makes
you feel better about your team's chances.

My thoughts had been that the distorted seedings this year might make it
less likely that the best team would win. I still can't tell if that
happened. Florida State's current ISR of 125.6 is the lowest by any #1
team in the five years that I've done them; essentially there hasn't been
a runaway #1 team this year, but there are at least four close contenders.
That means that the probability for any one of them wasn't going to be
that high. Most years there's someone up over a 25% chance of winning,
but not this year.

The Field

I'll have a table included in my discussion of each regional, so I need
to describe the columns.

W-L -- Won-loss record against Division I opponentsRPI -- Pseudo-RPI rankingISR -- ISR rankingProbs -- The probability of the team winning the regional,
super-regional, and championship, respectively, according to the method
described above.

It's pretty bad when I'm doing the first regional, and I'm already tired of
blaming the RPI's. There are two teams here who are good but not quite good
enough; neither USF nor Stetson deserved to get in (the cutoff for at-large
bids this year should have been after the #43 team, so even if you leave
out three or four for conference placement reasons, Stetson still doesn't
make it in). Neither of them are miscarriages of justice or anything, but
there were better teams left out. Both of them can be explained by having
inaccurately high RPI's.

South Alabama didn't quite deserve a #1 seed, but they weren't that far off;
those are the hazards of trying to pick sixteen #1's. Only one team each
from the Big Ten and Big East this year, and here they are. That's all
they deserved this year, but it's obviously a change from previous policy,
so we'll have to see next year if this holds up.

In some ways, the West Coast did better than usual this year, even though
this was an off-year for a lot of teams out there -- San Jose State and
Washington both got in despite shaky RPI's. On the other hand, we have
this travesty of a regional. The worst team here was a hare's breath away
from deserving a #1 seed. The really frustrating thing is that this was
so avoidable -- I don't begrudge Southern California a surprisingly easy
regional after the shredder they got run through last year, but swapping
one of their two cupcakes here or sending Fullerton to Mesa would have
been trivially easy. Ever wondered why Stanford hasn't won a national
title in fourteen years despite having one of the two or three best teams
almost every year? This is bad, but it's just a difference in degree and
not kind from what they've been put through every year.

Well, they messed up here, sort of, by giving USC West a #1 seed purely
because they managed to finish a game ahead of Stanford in conference,
but then they made it not matter by shipping two different #4 seeds in
here. The top two seeds should be able to put together a nice little
three game series if the pitching holds out.

There's really not much wrong here, which has to be scored as something of
an upset. Overall this year, the eight national seeds came from the ISR
top nine; they're in the wrong order in a few places, but the only real
error there was in Houston not getting a national seed, and they just
happened to be the odd team out from a tight cluster of teams. My first
thought was that Washington was a bad choice, but they actually played
themselves right onto the edge in the last few weeks of the season; I
certainly won't complain about a close Pac-10 team getting in given the
history.

You know, I've been as big a booster of the Tulane program as anybody not
associated with the school or team the last few years, but I just plain
can't explain this bid. The RPI's not interesting. They finished behind a
couple of better teams in their conference. They made a small run in the
conference tournament, but only into third place. It's not the worst
mistake ever made or anything, it's just hard to understand. LSU-Rice is
one of the more interesting potential super matchups, although Rice
probably deserved an easier opponent.

Another regional with two #4 seeds in it for no good reason. If they're
going to actually think about travel (as unlikely as that may be), it
probably makes more sense to have teams fly into an airline hub like
Houston than to somewhere like Austin. It's good to see Baylor get in
under the circumstances.

I wonder if ASU realized that they needed to start rooting for NMSU on
about Saturday or so if they wanted to host. Houston and Texas deserved
better fates than having to go through each other to get to Omaha.

It's interesting to see that ECU's ISR is actually higher than the RPI this
year; if you've followed in past years, you know that's a good indicator of
what the change in conferences has done to them. I'm glad that they won
their conference tournament, since that mooted the point of whether they
would get an at-large bid. Elon doesn't deserve to be here, but it's a
straight RPI bid, nothing sinister. How hard can it be to manage to be #92
in two widely different rating systems?

Wichita was probably the most relieved team in the country to learn that no
one in the Northeast had bid to host; they might have been blocked by
Nebraska if the regionalization plan had held up. They got one of the #1
seeds that should have gone to a Big West team, but they were close enough
that it's hard to quibble. Arkansas played the fourth-toughest schedule in
the nation this year; it's nice to see that rewarded.

If you're looking for a sleeper pick to win it, I think they're here. Wake
has won a ton of games over the last five years, and almost no one has
noticed. They match up well with Nebraska, and I think they've got a
decent shot. I'm surprised Richmond didn't get a #1 seed with that RPI and
conference; I guess Virginia's not really far enough north.

Harkening back to an earlier theme, why on earth would you fly two #4 seeds
into Lincoln, of all places? I mean, I love small-town America, but you
don't want to have to fly to get there. Glad to see SMS played their way
in last week; rightly or wrongly, they felt thoroughly slighted last year.
On the other hand, they didn't exactly spare the horses to get there, so
they may have extra trouble this week.

Unlike most of my neighbors, I don't mind this one all that much, other
than thinking that FAU probably didn't deserve to get in, winning streak
notwithstanding. There's no inherent reason conference teams can't play
each other as long as it's not used as a tool to minimize the chances of a
particular matchup late in the tournament; that doesn't seem to be the case
here.

Georgia Tech can make a case based on RPI that they should have been a
national seed; they wouldn't quite have deserved it, but it wouldn't have
been terrible. On the other hand, they were matched with an Alabama team
that's a bit overrated at #3 (it'll actually depend on which 'Bama team
shows up the next couple of weeks, but inconsistency will generally knock
you down a bit in the rankings), so they have about the chance they
deserved. Similar to Arkansas, it's good to see Georgia rewarded for
playing what turned out to be a killer schedule.

There's nothing much here to complain about. USC East is probably the
weakest of the national seeds, but, as I said, the group from #5 to #9
(Stanford, Houston, Wake Forest, Alabama, and South Carolina) is a
pretty close cluster at this point, so they're an acceptable choice.
The USC-Florida matchup is proof of something of a sense of humor.

On the one hand, it's nice to see that they were willing to leapfrog a
team in the conference standings (Western Kentucky, in this case) to get
a team that met their criteria; on the other hand, you kind of have to
wish they'd done it to get someone better than FIU this year. Just to
address the outrage, Miami deserved to get in. This is their worst team
in many years, and the W-L record is weak because they upgraded their
schedule this year, but in the end, they're one of the forty best teams
in the country.

The Omitted

Here are the top ISR teams who didn't make the tournament. Some of them
missed because of inaccurate RPI's; some missed because of their conference
standings. In general, these are big conference teams who collapsed late;
they might have fared well in the tournament, but the only one that's a real
shame is Northwestern State.

Rather than keep returning to the subject of pitch counts and pitcher
usage in general too often for my main theme, I'm just going to run a
standard feature down here where I point out potential problems; feel
free to stop reading above this if the subject doesn't interest you.
This will just be a quick listing of questionable starts that have
caught my eye or, on the other hand, starts where pitchers were pulled
according to plan early despite pitching extremely well in close games.

Date

Team

Pitcher

Opponent

IP

H

R

ER

BB

SO

AB

BF

Pitches

May 22

Southwest Missouri State

Brad Ziegler

Southern Illinois

8.0

11

7

7

2

10

36

40

144

May 26

Southwest Missouri State

Brad Ziegler

Wichita State

1.0

3

2

2

0

1

6

6

22

May 23

Southwest Missouri State

David Bader

Indiana State

4.1

4

5

5

3

0

16

19

86

May 26

Southwest Missouri State

David Bader

Wichita State

7.0

8

3

3

2

7

27

29

111

May 23

Mississippi State

Paul Maholm

Georgia

9.0

6

3

3

2

6

34

36

124

May 25

Louisiana State

Bo Pettit

South Carolina

8.0

8

5

4

2

8

34

36

136

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